This Spy for Rent

By JAMES BAMFORD

James Bamford is the author, most recently, of "A Pretext for War: 9/11,
Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."

WASHINGTON

Assessing, cultivating and recruiting spies has long been a key job of Central
Intelligence Agency officers. But now it is the C.I.A. officers themselves
who are being assessed, cultivated and recruited  sometimes right out
of the agency's cafeteria. In what is leading to a critical spy drain, private
companies are aggressively seeking highly trained employees of our espionage
agencies to fill government contracts.

With the resignation of George Tenet as director of central intelligence
and the final hearings of the 9/11 commission this week, the stage is set
for the first major restructuring of the intelligence community in decades.
While there has been much discussion of moving agencies and creating an
"intelligence czar," the privatization of our spies has been largely overlooked.

The C.I.A. is awash in money as a result of post-9/11 budget increases. But
because of the general uncertainty over the future, it faces a long delay
before it can recruit, train and develop a new generation of spies and analysts.
So for now it is building up its staff by turning to the "intelligence-industrial
complex."

These corporations range from Fortune 500 giants like Booz Allen Hamilton
and Northrop Grumman to small companies made up almost entirely of former
senior C.I.A. officers, like the Abraxas Corporation in McLean, Va. For example,
one Abraxas expert, Mary Nayak, formerly ran the Directorate of Intelligence's
South Asia group; now she's been hired as a consultant to the C.I.A.'s review
group on 9/11.

Private contractors are taking over jobs once reserved for highly trained
agency employees: regional desk officers who control clandestine operations
around the world; watch officers at the 24-hour crisis center; analysts who
sift through reams of intelligence data; counterintelligence officers who
oversee clandestine meetings between agency officers and their recruited
spies; and reports officers who act as liaisons between officers in the field
and analysts back at headquarters.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working
closely with private industry, there is the potential for trouble unless
the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under the C.I.A.'s
heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate
figures on just how much money and how many people are involved. But many
experts inside and outside the agency feel that we are talking about hundreds
of millions of dollars and thousands of contractors.

As was made clear by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, involving private contractors
in sensitive intelligence operations can lead to disaster. And the potential
for disaster only grows when not just the agents on the ground, but their
supervisors and controllers back at headquarters too, are working for some
private company.

Another problem has been an increased cost to taxpayers. Desperate to fill
their contracts, the companies frequently offer to double a federal employee's
salary. Because the recruiters have security clearances, they often make
their recruiting pitches at the C.I.A.'s headquarters in Langley, Va. And
many of those who do sign on end up going right back to their old office
 only now working for a private company. Thus, after spending millions
of dollars training people to be clandestine officers, taxpayers are having
to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies.

"The money is incredible," one agency veteran, who handled spies overseas
for years, told me. "I doubled my salary to go out and come back in and continue
doing what I was doing."

But some of these former officers warned me that their talents are being
wasted on unsophisticated tasks, and that because of the slap-dash nature
of the rush to expand, the quality of intelligence produced has become
questionable. "The problem is these jobs are mindless," one
officer-turned-contractor with decades of Middle East experience told me.
"So we're all just sitting there looking at each other, and we're making
a ridiculous amount of money."

Another former agency employee told me that he was among a group of contractors
assigned to analyze e-mail messages on computer hard drives snatched by
operatives in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. "A lot of it was in
Arabic and none of us spoke Arabic  just a little problem," he said.
"None of us really knew what we were doing and we had management who didn't
know what they were doing either."

As the United States gets more deeply involved in the war on terrorism and
the war in Iraq, there will be a corresponding increase in private spies.
This isn't all bad: by marrying well-trained federal employees with innovative
contractors working in a less structured role, perhaps we can find more effective
ways of tackling old problems.

But better oversight is critical. If Congress doesn't even know whom the
C.I.A. is hiring, how can anyone ensure that what they are doing (and how
much they are being paid) is acceptable? As we decide how to remake our
intelligence services, we need to find the right balance between the people
who make the cloaks and daggers and the people who wear them.